“Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.”

A few more words about Norman Borlaug

When I read last night, at about 2 A.M., that Norman Borlaug had passed, I reacted with a surprising amount of emotion. It wasn’t that I was sad – Borlaug lived to the ripe old age of 95 – but was perhaps because I knew that I was within a very small fraction of the population who knew that he even existed, one of few who would have any reaction to hearing of his death other than saying, “Who was he?” And it’s probably unfortunate that that is the case.

Borlaug is frequently credited with saving over a billion human lives. Like all estimates of supremely large numbers, it’s possibly not true. The origin of that number appears to be this 1997 Atlantic Monthly article, which is very much worth reading. I’ve read other estimates that this is off by 75%, that the number is more like 250 million. But, of course, that really doesn’t matter. Because no matter what, Borlaug is credited with saving more lives than any other human who has ever lived. And it’s really not hyperbole. Borlaug’s achievement is explained pretty well in the NYT obituary. Basically, he discovered ways to breed wheat to give grains that both greatly increased crop yields and also – critically – possessed a stalk body type that was sufficiently sturdy to bear this excess grain instead of collapsing under the increased weight and dying prematurely. It sounds simple enough, but discovering this, and then teaching it to farmers in developing countries, helped avert mass starvation predicted to rock many countries, especially back in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

That most people have never heard of him – despite being until yesterday one of a very small number of living Americans to have won a Nobel Peace Prize – is probably a combination of several factors. One is that we simply don’t pay much attention to the developing world. And when we do, it’s usually to show squalor, not progress. It’s also certainly because Borlaug never craved attention or fame.

Borlaug – and the Green Revolution in general – later came under attacks and criticisms, especially from the political left. I won’t pretend to be an expert on this, and all of the effects the Green Revolution has rendered. But I do know that most of these critics are missing the forest for the trees. Virtually every action has positive and negative consequences. But when the positive is the saving of hundreds of millions of lives, it outweighs any possible negatives, real or imagined. Borlaug is a true hero. Like him, I am also a scientist, but one who too often feels that scientific work – especially my own – will never amount to anything that matters or helps people. But I am conforted in toiling in obscurity if I know that for every large number of scientists, one of us might do a fraction as much good as Norman Borlaug.